Electronics giant Hitachi has announced details of its soon-to-shipped, 1 TB hard drive. The proclamation comes soon after a brief statement by Seagate, which yesterday confirmed that it will also deliver a 1 TB drive within the next three months. Hitachi has said it will ship the product during the first quarter.

Hitachi plans to sell the 7K1000 for about $400 retail, which compares to about $450 for Seagate's 750 GB drive.To elaborate on the product, as many as 18 terabyte drives would be enough to store the entire contents of the Library of Congress, which currently holds about 18 million books.

1 TB is also enough to store more than 300,000 6-megapixel images, 250,000 MP3s, 1000 hours of standard definition video or 250 hours of high-definition video.

While Hitachi is using five 200 GB platters to reach 1 TB, Seagate will be using four 250 GB platters, which indicates that Seagate will be announcing a new storage density record in commercial hard drives of more than 180 Gb/in2.

The 1 TB drive proves that the industry has overcome serious concerns of how to keep increasing hard drive storage densities and is looking towards hard drives with multiple terabytes of storage capacity. Compared to a $10,000/MB price in 1956, a capacity of 1 GB is priced today at about 40 cents, according to experts.